“Exogenesis”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Kevin G. Cremin
Season 3, Episode 7
Production episode 307
Original air date: February 12, 1996
It was the dawn of the third age… Corwin has been promoted from junior-grade lieutenant to full lieutenant, and is celebrating in the bar. Sheridan, Ivanova, Garibaldi, and Franklin are at a table off to the side—Corwin is the center of attention, surrounded mostly by other junior officers—and discuss whether or not Cole should’ve been invited to join them. Ivanova points out that Cole isn’t EarthForce and Sheridan agrees, saying that the Ranger needs to keep a low profile. It’s obvious that Sheridan’s reasons are professional, but Ivanova’s are personal.
In downbelow, two lurkers, Duffin and Lee, place a parasite on the back of another lurker. The parasite is absorbed into the lurker’s back—and then he dies, surprising Duffin and Lee. Another lurker, Samuel, says security is on their way, so they abandon the dead body.
Sheridan and Ivanova discuss Corwin: now that he has more responsibilities in CnC, he could be either a big hindrance to the Army of Light or a big help. Sheridan assigns Ivanova with the responsibility of finding out which he will be. Is he an ally they can cultivate or a liability they have to navigate around?
Cole meanders around downbelow, talking to various contacts. He’s surprised to not see Samuel, who he’s been cultivating. He also talks to Duncan (including quoting Macbeth at him), a not-very-successful merchant who is also obviously very ill. Cole recommends he see a doctor, but Duncan doesn’t like doctors. Cole buys something from him out of kindness.
Franklin does the autopsy on the lurker from the beginning of the episode, and while he can’t actually find a cause of death, he does discover a substance that is coating his entire spinal column. He removes it, and it moves on its own, prompting the doctor to put in a sealed sample case. It turns out to be a parasite.
Cole finally finds Samuel, who says he can’t work with Cole anymore, sorry, and buggers off. Samuel, Duffin, and Lee then put the alien parasite on another lurker: Duncan. Later, when Cole sees that Duncan isn’t in his usual spot, he learns that Duncan has packed it in and won’t be vending anymore.
This prompts Cole to go to Garibaldi (including paraphrasing A Christmas Carol at him), as both Samuel and Duncan are acting way out of character. However, that’s not an actual crime, so it’s not a job for security. If they’re behaving weirdly, Garbaldi says, maybe talk to a doctor.
So Cole goes to Franklin, exaggerates a bit (well, more than a bit) about what Garibaldi said, and gets the doctor to accompany him to downbelow to find Samuel and Duncan.
Ivanova invites Corwin for an informal get-together to talk about his future now that he’s a full lieutenant. She invites him to her quarters—in part because she has real coffee in her larder—and Corwin mistakenly thinks this might be a date. To that end, he buys flowers. But when he arrives at Ivanova’s cabin, her attitude leads him to panic and say that instead he found them left outside her quarters and he has no idea where they came from.
Over the course of the conversation, both parties are disappointed, as it soon becomes clear to Corwin that Ivanova is not at all interested in him as a dating partner and it becomes equally clear to Ivanova that Corwin is not going to be on board with going up against the Clark Administration’s creeping fascism.
Franklin reluctantly uses his medical override to enter Duncan’s quarters when he doesn’t answer, and they find a hole in the bulkhead covered with a weird cobwebby thing. They go through the hole and find another lurker laying on the ground like the guy at the beginning of the episode. Franklin can see the parasite under his skin. But before he can do anything about it, the other lurkers show up, point guns at them, and imprison them. Franklin is apprehensive, but not too worried since Garibaldi knows they’re doing this, until Cole breaks it to him that he doesn’t, actually.
Duncan, who is now completely healthy, tries to explain to Cole and Franklin that they mean no harm, but our heroes are less than impressed, as it sounds like the parasites are taking over people. Franklin reminds them that one of their victims died, and Duncan explains that he was incompatible due to the pharmaceuticals he’d consumed. (And Franklin did find that he had lots of drugs in his system during the autopsy.)
While they’re stewing in a cell, Cole asks Franklin if Ivanova doesn’t like him, as she’s been very cold to him lately. Franklin thinks Cole is nuts on several levels, not the least of which being why he’s talking about this when they’re in this situation.
One of the lurkers says that one of the people possessed by a Vindrizi is ill, and can Franklin cure him? Franklin says to take the parasite out, but that isn’t an option, apparently, and they take Franklin away.
Cole now only has two people guarding him. He convinces one that his staff is a medical scanner and he’ll need to activate it and bring it to Franklin. His instructions cause the staff to telescope open and smack the lurker in the face. This distracts the one closer to him enough for Cole to subdue him through the bars and get the keys to the cell. Cole tries to call CnC with Franklin’s link, but the links are tuned to their users, and refuses to allow Cole to use it. However, the unauthorized use of Franklin’s link does alert CnC, and Ivanova sends Garibaldi to the link’s location.
Cole meanwhile rescues Franklin. The lurkers explain that they are simply observers of the events of the universe. They have a limited lifespan, but they’re able to extend their lives by taking on host bodies. They go for people who don’t have a lot to live for, and only enter them when they volunteer. Franklin and Cole don’t believe that part at all, so Duncan’s parasite leaves him. Now fully himself again, he assures Cole and Franklin that the parasites—they’re called the Vindrizi—mean no harm and Duncan did accept the Vindrizi into himself willingly. He also can’t take the parasite back in, which means he’s back to being his old sickly self.
Convinced, Cole and Franklin relent. Franklin is willing to allow them to continue what they’re doing, but going forward they can only take hosts after those hosts are approved by Franklin. The Vindrizi agree. Franklin contacts Garibaldi and asks for a medevac for the sick lurker.
Ivanova tells Sheridan that Corwin should not be recruited into the inner circle of the We Hate President Clark Club. Duncan decides he wants to travel—the fleeting memories of the Vindrizi showed him that there’s a big wide galaxy out there, and he should go out and experience it. (How he’s paying for this is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
Nothing’s the same anymore. One of Cole’s contacts has a message from “Ranger One.” That’s Sinclair, though he’s not identified as such in the episode…
Ivanova is God. Ivanova’s desire to keep the meeting with Corwin somewhere where no one can overhear her grilling a subordinate about possibly committing treason leads to the unfortunate side effect of him thinking it might be a date. Oops.
The household god of frustration. Cole is annoyed that Garibaldi won’t investigate two lurkers acting weird. Garibaldi, for his part, can’t believe that Cole’s wasting his time with this bullshit.
In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Cole is told that Shadow vessels are massing at the Centauri border. Given that the Shadows are working hand-in-tentacle with the Centauri, this isn’t really a surprise to the viewer…
We live for the one, we die for the one. Cole has developed an impressive network of informants and messengers in downbelow. He also loves quoting old dead British writers.
No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. At the end of the episode, Franklin tells Ivanova that Cole wants a second chance with her, which leads her to think that Cole is the one who left the flowers by her door. (Which was, of course, a lie by Corwin to cover that he brought flowers to a staff meeting.) Ivanova then tosses the flowers at Cole, saying, “Keep them.” Cole, naturally, thinks that Ivanova got the flowers for him, and believes that he has a chance with her again. Wheeee!
Welcome aboard. Recurring regular Joshua Cox returns as Corwin from “Voices of Authority” with an actual subplot devoted to him for once. He’ll be back in “Point of No Return.” The late great Aubrey Morris (probably best known in genre circles as the perpetually bathing captain of the Golgafrinchan ship in the 1981 BBC TV adaptation of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) plays Duncan, while the other possessed lurkers are played by Eric Steinberg, Matthew Duffin, and Wylie Small.
Trivial matters. The “package” from Mars that Cole is told is en route will arrive next time in “Messages from Earth.”
It was established back in “The War Prayer” that Ivanova, against regs, grows coffee beans in hydroponics.
This is the first of many times that Cole and Franklin are paired off in the series. In addition, the actors who played them, Jason Carter and Richard Biggs, became very close friends in real life, and were often invited to conventions jointly as actor guests, until Biggs’ tragic death in 2004. (Your humble rewatcher was the Author Guest of Honor alongside the pair of them as the Media Guests of Honor at Con*Cept in Montréal in 2002.)
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“There are three of them with guns against two of us with nothing. They’ll cut us down before we get halfway across the room.”
“All we need is for one of them to leave the room. Then there’ll be only one man with a gun.”
“Excuse me—where I come from, one man from three leaves two.”
“Where I come from is a far more interesting place.”
—Franklin bitching about their odds, and Cole showing his strategically creative thinking.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Don’t you ever shut up?” It’s easy to forget, especially given the ridiculous “feud” in fandom between B5 and Deep Space Nine (a feud that was fueled by J. Michael Straczynski his own self), that Straczynski has always been a Star Trek fan. He pitched a Trek show to Paramount back in the day, and one of his comics credits is a Trek comic for DC.
But the best evidence that Straczynski is a Trek fan is this episode, because this is totally a Star Trek story. Strange alien that folks assume is dangerous, but turns out to be friendly, and the problem is resolved, not with violence, but with conversation and compassion—that’s Trek 101, from “The Devil in the Dark” to season four of Discovery.
And it works very nicely. The role of the Vindrizi in the grand scheme of things, as receptacles of experience and knowledge, is a noble one. And while it appears they’re taking over lurkers because they’re easy prey and no one will notice that they’re acting weird because few people give a shit about them, the truth is much simpler and nicer: the lurkers have the most to lose in life and the most to gain by bonding with the Vindrizi. And our heroes’ mistrust of them is sensible, especially since they’re doing all this in secret, plus one of their host bodies died. (That was the only part that I thought didn’t entirely work—these creatures have been around for all this time and this is the first occasion in which a potential host had weird substances in their bloodstream?)
It’s nice to see Corwin get promoted—always fun when the side characters get a moment or three in the sun—and I like that Corwin presents very much as not a candidate to join the Secret Society of Treason. The misunderstandings with the flowers and the Cole-Ivanova dynamic is a little too sticommy for my tastes, but it mostly worked thanks to Joshua Cox completely selling Corwin’s total panic at how to respond to Ivanova’s weird approach to his showing up with flowers.
Next week: “Messages from Earth.”